In some ways, I think that my love of Marie Brennan grows out of my love of Brandon Sanderson. The magic in Sanderson’s books is famously logical and scientific. In Mistborn, there are 16 metals and they all have a specific power which is bounded in its possibilities. Warbreaker has a particularly economic magic system where each person has a set amount of magic (“breath”) and in order to get more, you have to literally take someone else’s. In these worlds, you as a reader understand what is possible, the inputs and outputs. The “magic” of the book comes from the clever manipulation of these given tools to solve problems.
Marie Brennan’s series The Memoirs of Lady Trent takes this a step further. Dragons are simply an animal, a creature like any other, and that’s it. There’s no magic, no wizards, only a question of what would it look like if early Enlightenment natural philosophers were studying dragons instead of, well, whatever less cool animals they studied. In spite of the dragons on the covers, the plot of each of the five books is much less about fantastical elements or accomplishing some unknown feat than it is about travelling to an area, doing careful research and observations, perhaps some experiments, and then drawing conclusions from that about the biology and history of the world.
Her new book Turning Darkness into Light is the next logical step. Not only is there no magic or saving the world, but there are hardly any dragons at all, except in the myth that the main scholars are translating. That’s actually the main action of the novel: three people in a room trying to decipher an ancient text and understand the impact it will have on the world. Granted, one of them is a draconean, but his exotic nature matters mostly in his relationship to the text and what he has at stake because of it.
And yet Brennan manages to make this fascinating. Some ways that I think this works:
Footnotes: The way footnotes are used in this book reminds me strongly of Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The footnotes provide a commentary on the truth of the text from a historical perspective and let the audience feel like they are participating in scholarship on a completely made up subject. I loved seeing the translators understanding of obscure words evolve over time. You get a great vicarious sense of the eureka moments without having to actually go to graduate school yourself. To a certain type of reader (apparently me), this is utterly rewarding.
Real World Connections: Brennan has designed a plot that really pulls into focus how scholarship about the ancient past and translations of ancient documents can absolutely have an impact upon current events. As the scholars are translating, you get an increasing sense of foreboding as you know exactly what this text is going to do to the mindset of the people around them. You feel the tension between a desire to be honest about what they are finding and a desire to push public events in a positive direction. The conflict between these two leads to an interesting resolution which I won’t spoil for you.
World Building Chops: Brennan has them. Not only does the document have an original story, but it has an original way of telling it. The subtle linguistic patterns she incorporated into the translated “document” make it feel like you are really reading an ancient text. As someone who studied literature in college and loves picking out these patterns, I was completely engrossed.
In a tweet a few months ago, I tried to figure out what to call this genre and if there are other books in it. Is it science fantasy? Hard fantasy? Fantastic science? Academic fantasy? Secondary world science fiction? Whatever you call it, I am all in for it.
